All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

My husband and I sometimes like the same books in the genres we share (usually sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery) and sometimes, we just don’t. A book that really grabs one of us will fail to engage the other, and that’s OK, because reading is subjective. He really loved Martha Wells’ series The Murderbot Diaries, and after he recommended them, I mentally filed them under, “Sounds interesting, will check out when I get a chance” but hadn’t gotten around to reading them. Then I heard a few more people add their recommendation that this was a really great sci-fi series, so I gave it a shot and I’m glad I did.

All Systems Red is told from the perspective of an AI robot that calls itself Murderbot, in a futuristic world with lots of space travel and space capitalism. Murderbot is technically not a murderbot, it’s a security robot, but it has managed to hack its own internal systems so that it no longer has to follow orders. Essentially, it’s a robot with free will, and all the complexities that entails. When you no longer have to do the thing you were created and designed to do, what do you choose to do instead?

Murderbot handles these weighty philosophical questions with a wry humour that is, in some ways, recognizably human (a lot of the times, its answer to “what do you choose to do instead?” is just “be left alone to watch TV,” which, OK, we get that). But we never forget that Murderbot isn’t actually human, even though it may look a bit human, and its analytical gaze at human beings and their actions/reactions is believably “other.”

There are several books in this series and the first two, at least (which are all I’ve read so far) are quite short, almost more like novellas, so it’s quite easy to zip through one and on to the next!